The Limits of Ideology

TIME STANDS STILL when it counts. A meeting with the foreign minister of Vietnam in Muscat during an invigorating conference on the Indian Ocean organised by the multi-talented Ram Madhav and the Oman government triggered association to a seminal conflict which became the tragedy of the 1960s and an epic of the 1970s, the Vietnam War. The American government became trapped on two fronts: the revolution on its own campuses, and the extraordinary courage of Vietnamese self-belief that prevailed over pitiless napalm. Vietnam redefined the meaning of power for the 20th century. It seeped into my consciousness and became the emotional script of transition from teenage to adult-age during the three years of lost education in the iconic Presidency College in violence-plagued Calcutta between 1967 and 1970. An early memory of the college is the wavy-script slogan plastered on the walls, written in Bengali, a language that lives on rhythm: Aamar naam, tomar naam, shobar naam Vietnam. It neither sounds nor means the same in English: “My name, your name, every name is Vietnam” is flat prosaic monotone compared to the phonetic music of Bengali.

The other imperishable image is the black-and-white picture of the last helicopter racing away from the American embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, a moment that ended one history book and spawned a million new chapters. One of the best books on Vietnam was published in 1972, three years before history came to a halt, when America knew it had been defeated but its government did not know how to accept this truth. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest narrated step by careful step how the cream of American intellectual elite, enticed by that dangerous nymph called good intentions, dragged a mighty power into the toxic swamp that infected the world. Half a century of debate and consideration later, the only rational conclusion is paradox chasing itself into a spin.

Superpower America survived this self-inflicted laceration because democratic institutions found the medicine men who were able to heal the wounds and inject rejuvenation. In a signal reminder that victory can be as problematic as defeat, the Soviet Union, America’s ideological and military nemesis which shared control of much of the world after World War II, decided that it was time for its own Vietnam. Hubris was never any tribe’s monopoly. About five years after that helicopter in Saigon, Moscow invaded Afghanistan only to discover that its economic impoverishment was not synonymous with national fragility. The 1980s were consumed by the Afghanistan misadventure. The Soviet Union did not possess the recuperative remedies of democracy. Anyone remember Leonid Brezhnev, the Ukrainian with brooding eyebrows and heavy jowl who, as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) for almost as long as the founder of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, destroyed the political edifice of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin? In 1975, Moscow and Beijing advertised Vietnam as a communist triumph. That was not quite correct. America was defeated by Vietnamese nationalism, not communist internationalism.

What none of the communist powers knew in 1975 was that their ideology was pumping waste rather than blood. The myth of ideological solidarity was exposed yet again less than four years after the last helicopter. On February 17, 1979, China invaded Vietnam at three points, Lao Cai, Cao Bang and Loc Binh, to punish Hanoi for removing the horrendous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Beijing forgot that the legendary Vietnamese Defence Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap had defeated the French and the Americans in their era of glory. Within 27 days China retreated before the Vietnamese counteroffensive. To its credit, Beijing accepted defeat without fuss. The Vietnamese were polite while saying goodbye.

As I write, 45 years after that war, the Vietnamese parliament has endorsed a railway line between Vietnam and China. Both are now pragmatic powers rather than ideological hothouses.

No one is infallible. No one is invincible. The proof of ideology lies in the pudding. Communism is dead in Russia and under house arrest in China, an ageing grandfather who cannot breathe but will not be buried. The Vietnamese, like the Chinese, offer titular fealty. Both have shifted towards capitalism sprinkled with a light dust of socialist characteristics.

Muscat is beautiful because the people are serene; and the people are serene because their leaders keep geography at a safe distance from politics. In the tensions of geopolitics, you may not be able to do much about geography, but you can do something about politics. The Sultanate of Oman is a neighbour of Yemen.

Could two regions be more alike and two countries more different? That is the difference that leaders can make.

The Omanis have been masters of the seas; their maritime empire between Gwadar and the Strait of Hormuz to Zanzibar checked British ambitions till the 18th century. India was a principal trading partner in an era when Mughal royalty like Nurjahan and Shahjahan owned merchant fleets. China and India were great manufacturing powers of the pre-colonial world; till 1750 China had roughly 30 per cent of the world manufacturing output, and India around 23 per cent. Africa was a principal market; Oman and Zanzibar were the gateways that took goods up to Italy and beyond. A question I raised at the conference bears some consideration: why were there no major naval wars in the Indian Ocean before the Europeans turned up, beginning with Portugal and ending with Britain and France? Asian powers understood that peaceful trade was mutually beneficial; colonialism turned profits into one-way traffic.

Alas, an Omani must share the blame for Europe’s rise. Portugal’s Vasco da Gama, who made his money and reputation by finding a sea route to Kerala, would have floundered again in 1498 but for an Omani navigator, Ibn Majid, who came aboard and showed Vasco da Gama the route to India. The rest is restless.

While discussing the merits or otherwise of communism, an Israeli friend pointed out, correctly, that the Jewish people had given us both Marxism and capitalism. Karl Marx was Jewish. Scotland’s Adam Smith might want to share the honours for free markets, but theory must be put into practice to make it credible. Jewish bankers, wizards of capital, invented modern capitalism. It was my turn to point out that the credit for belief systems which dominate the 21st century must go another great Jew, the prophet Abraham, a patriarch revered as the forefather of prophets by Christians and Muslims as well. The only major religions or ideologies of non-Jewish origin come from India: Hinduism and Buddhism.

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